A. L. Buehrer What I Write and Why

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Insomniac

It's a strange thing watching the night creep
by through the dimly glowing windows, not quite aware that you've been still
for hours and hours, silently staring like a corpse, not caring that all the
clocks in the house are listening to you breathing. Slowly, midnight passes. It
doesn't matter. Gradually, the stars move toward the blackness of the west. You
don't even feel it.

Events occur in a massive block of an element
we call time. There has been debate in intellectual circles whether the past is
at all moments just as real as the present, which is in turn, just as real as
the future. I think it's true.

You don't even realize it, but you've lain
awake, pretending, for the rest of the world's sake that you were asleep, for
seven hours. Then, as if in a dream, you see sunlight--or something like
it--filling the negative space around the dead fingers of a black tree outside
your window. The birds are singing. The watery twilight swells to dawn. It
doesn't matter.